Serving Your CTI Project

Voice & Data has told you earlier

why you should go for CTI. If you are open to the idea, this

article, from none other than the CTI company, Dialogic,

will tell you how you should do it.

You have decided to go ahead with that

Computer-Telephone Integration (CTI) project you have been

thinking about. So you contact a few vendors, collect some

product information–and suddenly the whole project begins to

look a lot more complicated than you expected. The "silver

bullet" CTI product you expected to find does not exist, and

the vendors who seem to know what they are doing are asking you

more questions than you are asking them.

What is going on here? Is this CTI stuff for

real?

Yes, computer-telephone integration is for

real. And it is being successfully implemented by many

organizations–probably including your competitors. With the

right expectations, the right team, and the right project

structure you can see the benefits of CTI in your shop, too. The

secret is in how you approach a CTI project.

Right up front, you should forget about finding

a single cure-all CTI product. The "I" in the CTI

acronym, after all, stands for "integration".

Integration means making a collection of elements work together.

That is what CTI is all about: making your telephone and computer

systems work together. There is no single product–hardware

or software–that can do this by itself. You have a unique

combination of systems in your organization, and you have unique

strategies regarding customer service and workflow. Your CTI

project will need to interconnect and coordinate all these

systems, and implement these strategies. It is extremely unlikely

that you will find a single off-the-shelf product that can

automate your specific situation.

That does not mean you have to undertake an

expensive and risky custom software effort. There are powerful,

reliable, and affordable CTI products out there. But they are

building blocks, not turnkey systems. Your CTI project will

primarily consist of selecting appropriate products and

configuring them to work together to implement the call flow you

have in mind. This is not as difficult as building systems from

scratch, but neither is it a trivial or obvious process. You will

be surprised to discover that deciding what you want to do may be

harder than implementing the resulting system.

Because your CTI project will involve many

different business functions and technologies, you will need to

assemble a cross-functional project team. Establish this team

from the outset, so that all team members can contribute to the

up-front planning as well as the execution. At a minimum, you

will want to include:

• Someone from the business area to be
  
  automated. (Let us assume this is you.)
• Someone from the Information Systems (IS)
  
  department. (CTI systems usually involve important
  
  interfaces into existing business systems and databases.)
• Someone from the telecommunications
  
  department. (The telecom function may be part of the IS
  
  organization, but it is a different speciality. Make sure
  
  a telecom expert is in your team.)
• Someone from the finance department. (CTI
  
  systems often provide strategic competitive advantages,
  
  but they are usually approved based on potential cost
  
  savings. Your financial analyst can help you pinpoint the
  
  payback for your project, and pave the way for senior
  
  management approval.)

Make sure that your team is really a team,

working together in the best interests of the entire

organization. The cross-disciplinary nature of CTI projects makes

close cooperation absolutely essential. Team members must be able

to attack implementation issues openly and honestly, and some of

these issues will be politically sensitive. Inter-organizational

jealousy or distrust will make effective cooperation impossible,

and seriously jeopardize your project. Fix organizational

problems before you begin, or ask to have different team members

assigned. Above all, make sure that your project has top-level

management support. That support will be essential in order to

resolve the inevitable cross-organizational issues that

intra-team diplomacy cannot handle.

Will you need outside help? That depends on the

resources available within your own organization. CTI projects

require a mixture of skills that are not often found in the

typical business organization, and mistakes can be costly when

you are dealing with mission-critical systems and workflows. If

you feel confident that your organization has the resources to

handle large cross-technology integration projects, and if there

are at least a few people in your organization who are personally

familiar with both computing and telephone technologies, you may

not need outside resources. Otherwise, you will probably want to

seek out a consultant, systems integrator, or value-added

reseller with CTI experience to join your project team. In return

for the investment on professional services, you should expect a

clear statement of work and a specific, auditable contribution to

your project.

You would not necessarily need outside

resources for the entire project; perhaps you just need help

deciding on realistic goals, defining new CTI call flows,

building a prototype application, or designing an overall system

architecture for the final implementation. If you do decide on

outside help, be prepared to pay a fair market price. The

situation-specific advice you will need goes far beyond the

general product information that most vendors provide for free

during a normal selling cycle. Do not expect your vendors’

RFP responses to contain enough details to serve as a project

plan or system design!

Expect communication difficulties within your

team. Your team members will come from many different backgrounds

and disciplines, which is why they are on your team in the first

place. But they will all come to the team with a different

vocabulary, and those vocabularies will be meaningless to team

members in different disciplines. It is your role as project

leader to make sure that team members are communicating

effectively. Do not be timid about checking whether team members

are really understanding each other. Most troublesome are terms

which may exist in the different disciplines, but mean different

things. Mention the term "terminal equipment" during a

team meeting, and data processing staff will think of a keyboard

and screen; telecom’s staff will think of a handset and

dialing pad. Such misunderstandings are lethal to a CTI project.

To avoid these problems, encourage everyone on the team to make a

special effort to speak and write in plain language.

Now that you have your team assembled, what are

you going to do? Remember the old adage: "If you do not know

where you are going, any road will get you there." In other

words, if you do not know where you are going, you are doomed

from the outset. Doomed projects are no fun! Do not undertake a

CTI project without knowing exactly where you want to go. Take a

careful look at your present operation and decide together which

specific call flow and workflow improvements would be most

beneficial.

An effective way to begin is to sit with your

customer service agents for a day or two, listening in on calls

and watching what they do. If you are like most shops, several

potential improvements will quickly jump out at you. These

changes do not always involve the typical CTI functions of

automated screen pops or voice/data transfers (although those are

always likely candidates). Keep an open mind. You may find a way

to speed up after-call work using CTI-collected data, or a way to

keep your lists clean by matching inbound call ANI against

existing list entries. Do not forget to ask your agents and

supervisors for suggestions. They are the ones on the phones day

after day, and they know what is working and what is not.

Do not try to do everything at once. Like the

information systems they are connected to, CTI systems are not

"one-shot" installations. Expect a process of

continuous improvement. Implement some changes, watch to make

sure they are successful, study again, and then implement some

more. Learn as you go. For your first round of CTI improvements,

pick just a few workflow adjustments that seem to have the

greatest potential payback. Identify clearly what you want to do,

and what the end result is intended to be.

When you have identified a few top-priority

improvements, double-check your proposed call handling procedures

from your callers’ perspective. Does the call flow make

sense to a caller? Does it feel friendly and efficient? Imagine

where your customers will be when they call, and what information

they will have readily at hand. Screen pops based on a

calling-party phone number will not be very useful if your

customers call from random locations. Asking them to enter an

account number via the telephone keypad will not work if the

account number does not appear prominently on the paperwork you

send them, or if the account number includes alphabetic

characters.

Prototypes or small proof-of-concept projects

are an excellent way to verify proposed improvements.

Client-server computing techniques make it possible to implement

new CTI functions at just a few experimental workstations,

without disrupting the rest of the shop. Prototypes demonstrate

CTI call flow more clearly than paper specifications, since

testers sit in front of live screens and live telephones.

Prototypes can be used to fine-tune the human-factors aspect of

your proposed improvements, and can be used to measure

before-and-after workflow efficiencies and call timings for

credible cost-benefit analyses. And when the time comes to secure

senior management support for your project, a prototype can often

demonstrate the value of the proposed investment much more

effectively than memos or presentations.

When you seek financial approval for your

project, make sure everyone agrees on the goals and how to

measure them. What results are most important: Cost savings?

Customer service improvements? Strategic competitive advantage?

Workflow simplification? Support for new business initiatives? A

well-designed CTI project should achieve many of these things.

But trade-offs are inevitable, and you will want to be clear at

the outset which goals are most important, and which can be

scaled back if difficulties are encountered. This can be a

delicate balancing act. The goals used to get a CTI project

approved are usually measurable items like operational

efficiency. But the real goals, by which the project ultimately

will be judged in the eyes of senior management, will be

strategic factors such as improved customer service and

competitive advantage. Luckily, a well-conceived CTI project can

deliver both.

With your project approved, it is time for the

real implementation. Try to break down your project into the

smallest feasible (but meaningful) phases, so that you can stop

and assess your progress after each phase. It is better to have a

series of incremental improvements every three months than a

twelve-month project that delivers no apparent value until the

next fiscal year. You will also learn a lot as your project

proceeds, and you may want to take the project in a different

direction after six months based on what you have learned in the

initial project phases. Keeping your phases short and simple

reduces your risk and gives you more flexibility.

Even so, be prepared to re-evaluate,

re-implement, and backtrack. CTI systems are tied closely to

business workflow, and as with any workflow project, the

consequences of a change are not always apparent in advance. Some

changes may turn out to be unworkable due to unforeseen factors,

or it may be necessary to make additional changes in other

systems to accommodate what was originally thought to be a

localized change. If a new opportunity becomes apparent, you will

want to reassess project priorities. These adjustments are not

the sign of a failed project; rather, they are a sign that the

process of computer-telephone integration is helping your

organization improve and learn in unforeseen ways. Even an

implementation activity that results in a dead-end is valuable if

you learn valuable things along the way.

Beware of "scope creep"—that is,

constant incremental re-definition of a project’s goals.

Scope creep is insidious, because it happens in small steps. It

seems so easy to add just one more little feature or function.

But these additions add up, and often they turn out to be more

difficult and time-consuming than initially anticipated. Define

your project phases carefully, and do not change your definition

mid-phase without a very good reason—and with complete

agreement among the team and management, and with appropriate

documentation.

An often-ignored aspect of a CTI project is the

planning for after-installation support. When you come in one

morning and the screen does not pop data when the phone rings,

who are you going to call? The problem could be in any of the

dozen systems or functions. You will need a single contact point

for initial support calls. This can be either someone in your own

organization or an outside vendor (who will expect to be paid for

their services). That person or team is responsible for

first-tier diagnosis and escalation to the appropriate vendors.

All of your vendors should know who this first-tier support

resource is, and should agree to accept properly diagnosed

trouble calls from them and respond in a guaranteed time-frame.

But do not expect your vendors to handle undiagnosed trouble

calls. The first level of diagnosis needs to be done by someone

familiar with your system environment and business practices.

Now you have the first several phases of your

CTI project up and running. The first phases suggest further

improvements, so more phases are planned. When are you done?

In a word, never! Customer needs change, and

your organization’s products and services must change in

response. Your competition is constantly trying to gain an

advantage, and you must respond with new business approaches.

Government regulations change forcing changes in workflow and

record keeping. Technology evolves and offers new cost-effective

capabilities. Because CTI functions are so tightly intertwined

with your fundamental business operations, all of these factors

will require changes to your CTI environment.

Is this a problem? No. It is an opportunity to

constantly improve your customer service. Welcome to

computer-telephone integration. You will wonder how you ever got

along without it!